What You Need to Know to Be Culturally Literate in 2016

There are lots of things they don’t teach you in school. How to mesh music with technology, the way Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre have managed to do. How to navigate a post-Snowden security landscape. Why Ebola can help us fight other diseases. When it comes to living in the here and now, your education is incomplete. Good news: We’re about to school you. We’ve assembled the ultimate cheat sheet for the worlds of security and government, business, science, design, and culture. You’ll learn about the core people and concepts, as well as the go-to Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr feeds that you absolutely must follow. Welcome to your crash seminar in the present. Feel free to take notes.

You were born on a different planet. The one you live on now is hotter, with more droughts and floods. That means old diseases in new places (and researchers finding new ways to fight them). It’ll be harder to grow food (but scientists will engineer new things to eat). It’ll even seem less crazy to want to move to another planet altogether. And we’ll have to ask whether we’re going to keep changing Earth for the worse—or find new ways to make it better.

Entertainment has always been a getaway, but that vacation is getting longer and longer. Virtual reality recruits your very limbic system for the voyage to elsewhere. Movie studios know that epic-scale world-building is big business. We commit to long-arc TV series the way we once did to novels. Music albums are all-encompassing experiences once again. Immersive entertainment is no mere distraction—it’s a deep dive.

The governments of the world have amassed the greatest surveillance and hacking powers in history, but when it comes to defending our personal data, we’re on our own. That’s what Edward Snowden has taught us, redefining our notion of government spying. Post-Snowden America is still sorting out how to prioritize privacy and security, two goals we wish were aligned but that look more starkly opposed every day.

Since the days of the first web browser, businesses have felt the pressure to go online. But today the Internet connects the cities we live in and the appliances we use. It’s how we watch TV, listen to music, hail rides, trade stocks, chat
with doctors, educate kids, store files, and shop for groceries. The Internet is no longer just one aspect of doing business; it’s the core of how business works—the essential infrastructure of the global economy.

The era of invisible design —meant to save us time, energy, even clicks—is here. Our interactions now feel seamless and familiar, indistinguishable from our subconscious. It’s the magic of Apple’s San Francisco font, which adapts to screen size, the brilliance of solar cells that can sheathe and power a skyscraper, the delight of a car stereo that you control by waving your finger. If you haven’t noticed, the designers are doing their jobs.